The Mummy - Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor

Life’s A Dragon, 
Then You Die

The Mummy - 
Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor
United States/Germany/China/Canada 
2008 Directed by Rob Cohen
Universal UK Blu Ray

Warning: Some mild spoilers.

We were all smacking our lips in anticipation of a third film in the Rick O’ Connell Mummy series after the brilliance of The Mummy (reviewed here) and the pretty great follow up The Mummy Returns (reviewed here). And we were all dreadfully disappointed in what finally came out in cinemas. Stephen Sommers, who wrote and directed the previous two installments, did not direct this movie... other than he’s listed as one of the producers. I hate to say it but... it really shows. I don’t know why he wasn’t involved but his 2004 movie Van Helsing, where he further expanded his reimagining of the classic Universal monster movies, was not treated kindly by critics or box office alike. I don’t know why because I thought that particular take was also pretty good but, I don’t know, maybe that’s why he didn’t do the third Mummy movie. He is sorely missed in this sequel. 

Now, the film isn’t a total mess... it certainly works as a typical action adventure movie of the 2000s but, that’s where this film also fails big time. The thing about the previous two installments is that they were both something very special... so expectations were high this would deliver a similar concoction and, to be fair, a lot of the ingredients which made those two a huge success are present and relatively correct. There’s a huge element missing though and, that element would be... fun. Despite an overemphasis perhaps on the humour found in the first two, this film is not the entertaining romp it should have been and falls flat a lot of the time. That being said, there are one or two notable things in the film and, honestly, it’s not the cast’s fault for sure.

We only have two returning actors from the first film present and correct here... that would be Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell and John Hannah as Evelyn’s brother Jonathan. And they’re as good as they can be with this script... as are all the other actors. Another character returns from the previous film, Rick and Evie’s son Alex but, of course, since this is set halfway through the next decade again (each Mummy move in this series is set in a different decade) and Alex is supposed to be considerably older and grown up, he couldn’t be played by the same actor (as this was only about seven years since the last film). Instead they get Luke Ford, who makes a not bad stab at this and even, somehow, manages to have some of the same character traits of the child version from that last story. I say somehow because, character consistency is not high on the priority with the next actor I’ll talk about... again, not her fault.

Okay, so the great Rachel Weisz did not, for reasons known best to her (with many different reported explanations for her absence but I think I believe her when she says she didn’t like the script), return for this sequel. However, the character of Evelyn is all present and correct and the original actress was replaced in this film by Maria Bello. And she does a great job so I mean it as no disrespect to say that, in this role, she is no Miss Weisz. Now, one of the problems I have with her is that she is playing it in a much different manner to the character we’ve come to know. That decision could be defended by remembering that, in the last movie, Evelyn was resurrected from the dead as both herself and the daughter of the murdered Pharaoh in the first film... so a slightly different personality could be a valid choice... if that fact were at all referenced in this one but, nope, not much (if anything) is said about it (this time it’s her husband who gets killed and then brought back to life). She does get a nice line of dialogue though... which I’ll come back to in a minute. 

For the record, both Arnold Vosloo and Oded Fehr declined to return for this film also... so the original script must have been pretty different from what we ended up with. 

Two other big actors in this movie are both kung fu legends in their own country... Jet Li as the villainous Dragon Emperor himself and future Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh. Both are great but, come on... another reason people were chomping at the bit for this movie was that we wanted to see them both put their kung fu skills to use (and a ten minute fight scene between the two would have been most welcome). It would be an understatement to say that neither has a chance to shine in this one... especially in Yeoh’s case. 

Right... there are a few nice things. One is that we are re-introduced to Evelyn at a book reading of her latest novel, based on the second of her adventures. When someone asks her if the character in her book is based on her, Bello’s face is revealed and she says... “Honestly, I can say she's a completely different person.” Which is a nice and cheeky nod to the audience (pretty much the only one in the film, I’ll get to that) that she is a different actress taking over the role. It’s the exact same kind of metatextual comment on casting that George Lazenby delivers at the end of the pre-credits sequence in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (reviewed here) when he turns to the camera and says, “This never happened to the other fellow.” So... a nice moment. 

The only other nice thing in this movie... for me... asides from a nod to the first two films by having the name of Jonathan’s night club be “Imhotep’s”... is the inclusion of a small bunch of abominable snowmen... aka yetis... who help out our merry band of heroes at a crucial time. They’re nicely done although, I’ve no idea how two of the creatures can make a visual reference to the game of American Football... to be sure. Maybe try not to think about that too hard. 

A curious thing is that, when Jet Li’s character is fully resurrected, he can take on various forms. The two things he shape shifts into seem curious choices. One is a three headed dragon which bears an uncanny resemblance to King Ghidorah in the original Godzilla films and the other creature he changes into seems to slightly resemble King Caesar, from that same cycle of Godzilla films so... I dunno... I’m surprised the studio didn’t get sued over this. Maybe the director was secretly trying to pitch for a Godzilla reboot at the time? Who knows but... anyone who is into their kaiju eiga would surely get a jolt at seeing these creatures here.

As I was watching the film... I was trying to figure out why it just doesn’t work. There’s loads of humour (which mostly falls flat for me... unlike the other two movies), the action set pieces are well put together, the actors are all good and Randy Eidelman’s score for this (although partially replaced by stuff from John Debney, it would seem) is sweeping and fine... if not a patch on the scores provided for the earlier films by Jerry Goldsmith and Alan Silvestri. I think, for me, the film loses out in terms of the script and the way the humour is played. The script is really stating the obvious and explaining every last thing to the audience and capitalising it... me and my father looked at each other this time when a particularly stupid line (one of the unintentionally stupid lines) came up. And the other problem with it is that, unlike its predecessors, the audience aren’t let in on the joke. Asides from the “different person altogether” line, there are none of the sly winks to the audience that the other two had. It feels like its taking itself too seriously and, consequently, it never really gets us on its side... it’s just not as entertaining as either previous installment and... yeah... it’s just a bit of a let down.

No further films were made (as yet) in this series although, the Tom Cruise version of The Mummy (reviewed here) does include the book of the dead from the first film as a visual reference in one scene... so it’s technically taking place in the same universe. A fourth one featuring an Aztec Mummy was planned but never came to fruition... again, as yet. As for how I stand on this... well, for me, The Mummy - Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor certainly hasn’t grown on me. It was as much of a disappointment this time around as the previous times I saw it so, yeah, if you only see this one, don’t miss out on the first two just because this is not up to scratch. I hope someday the original writer/director and cast will come back to do just one more but... who knows if that will happen. 

The Music Man

7T6 Trombones 
With A Capital T

The Music Man
Directed by Morton DaCosta
USA 1962 
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone A 

I’d never seen one of my dad’s favourite musicals, The Music Man, before... although, of course, the song 76 Trombones is obviously a musical earworm to this day. Indeed, the film and stage show is such a well known piece that, even though I’d not seen it, I was easily able to recognise that wonderful parody of one of the songs and a character featured in The Simpsons episode about the monorail. 

So I finally saw it and was not only charmed by it... I immediately leapt onto the computer to grab one of the last remaining copies of the movie version soundtrack from that well known website named after a tribe of women who used to cut their own breast off in order to improve their use with a bow and arrow (more coverage of that in a future blog probably never but, I like to throw these little pieces of dubious info in from time to time). I had to source a copy of the film on American Blu Ray because there just seems to be a dearth of the genre available in that format in the UK at the moment. C’mon people... we want more high definition musicals!

Okay... so... adapted from the very long running Broadway smash by Meredith Wilson (and including many more songs which never made it to the stage version but were indeed written for it at one point or another), The Music Man tells the story of Professor Harold Hill... not a professor but, instead, a conman who goes from town to town selling the proposition of a boy band with instruments and music, swindling people out of dollars and keeping his neck out of deep water with a little bit of oomph and pizazz.

Hill is played by Robert Preston, blessed with more than a regular helping of that particular oomph and definitely a large side order of said pizazz, who made the show his own on stage but was nearly passed up for the movie by Warner Brothers, who wanted someone bigger. It apparently took Cary Grant to both refuse the part and furthermore tell Warner Brothers that he wouldn’t even go to see it in cinemas if Preston wasn’t in it, to seal the deal. 

Preston’s love interest, the target of his initially false affections until the con backfires on his emotional wellbeing, is Shirley Jones (pregnant at the time with young Patrick Cassidy, of TV fame) who does a wonderful job. Preston’s friend, in on the con, is Buddy Hackett and, playing Jones’ very young brother, is the then seven year old Ronny Howard. Yep. The same red headed kid who would grow up to star in films like American Graffiti, hang out with The Fonz in Happy Days and, of course, be a major modern film director, still, at time of writing. 

And it’s all just wonderful. Shot in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, the film is very well designed with frames based, as far as I could see, on vertical rectangles in the composition to divide up the screen to highlight elements of the story. Not to mention some wonderful transitions where, towards the end of a scene, everything apart from the principal actors will suddenly fade to pitch black, revealing the artifice of the stagey setting in what I can only describe as a ‘soon to be’ Godardian manner. Although, I guess at that time, it’s probably more akin to Brechtian theatre? Lars Von Trier would cerrtainly know, I suspect. ;-)This technique is also used to softly pull frames out and set them aside each other in a kind of masked split-screen, so songs and their counterpoint can be put together and shown from different scenes simultaneously, at one point. 

And Robert Preston is just amazing in this. What a vibrant personality this guy has, as he fast talks his way out of everything and then makes a little, throw away hand-dusting motion every time he gets over a little hurdle in his con game. Talk about buckets full of charisma. 

And the songs are... well, you always get a couple of duds... but the majority of them are not just great, they’re multilayered with the lyrics doing an abnormally large amount of heavy lifting when it comes to plot exposition, Which sounds bad but it in no way makes them any less charming. On the contrary many of them are very clever and... I’m guessing very hard to learn with some of the dense sets of layers bounding off each other. There must have been an awful lot of rehearsals in this production.

And, yeah, I’m not going to say much more on The Music Man, I’m just going to leave it for you to discover for yourself if you haven’t already, except to say that as much as Meredith Wilson made from this show, the film and the profit percentage... it was actually surpassed by the amount of money he made from The Beatles cover version of ‘Til There Was You from this musical... which is not a song I like but, there you go. But, yeah, give this movie a go because it’s very cool. 

Return To Silent Hill

Dodgy Pyramid Scheme

Return To Silent Hill
Directed by Christophe Gans
France/United States/United Kingdom/
Germany/Serbia/Japan 2025
Entertainment Film Distributors
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: A hill full of spoilers herein, I guess. 

Well, okay then. 

I was kinda looking forward to a third Silent Hill movie when it was announced, especially since it’s directed by Christophe Gans, who did the first movie and who also directed the masterpiece that is Brotherhood Of The Wolf (reviewed by me here). This third film, Return To Silent Hill, is kind of a soft reboot for the franchise in that the only returning characters I could detect here are the grotesque nurses and, of course, Pyramid Head.

However, it has to be said that, for a good deal of the running time I was a bit disappointed in this one (although for the first half an hour or so I was convinced this would be the best of the three to date). I certainly had no problem with the lack of context to the surrealistic nightmare that was the town of Silent Hill and all that goes on in its environs, that’s for sure. And following an almost optimistic, love story approach to the opening of the story, the quick spiral into the main lead (played by Jeremy Irvine) going to the town in question in search of his girlfriend (played by Hannah Emily Anderson) and the driven, unflinching and unrelenting plunge into frequent, morbid and nightmarish suspense was something which initially had me on the edge of my seat. Again though, only for about half an hour or so until I figured out something... and here’s where my short review gets kinda spoilery folks. 

After a direct confrontation between the male lead and the fan favourite Pyramid Head, I figured out something pretty basic about the nature of these two and so I stopped caring about what was going to happen to the anti-hero of the piece. If I’m not very much mistaken (and it’s made both clear and then obscured or muddied by the last sequence of the film, as I see it), then the main protagonist is also an aspect of Pyramid Head, from what I could tell... or did I get that wrong? He’s just a self induced metaphor for the horrors of Silent Hill. That’s my interpretation of the visual data here, at least. 

So after this... I knew he couldn’t come to any harm and I kinda stopped caring (although it’s not made implicit until near the end of the movie for the ‘hard of thinking’, it seems to me). And, although the film is well made in terms of inventiveness (presumably culled from the video game Silent Hill 2, which I’ve not played myself, only the first one) and it’s very well put together, I had a few other problems with the movie too. 

One of those is... it’s not all that scary. Which should be a cardinal sin for a film in this particular franchise. For instance, the sexy, mutant nurse thingies which were such a marvelous and terrifying element of the first two movies, seem to have absolutely no visual impact here at all. It almost feels like the director has included them because people expect them to be here. But the effect of them is totally diluted and they seem an easy enough challenge to overcome. 

And the other big thing which really unsettled me was the way in which some of the acting was rendered. Especially the main lead played by Jeremy Irvine. Now congratulations to Gans if this was indeed supposed to look flat and clumsy like a video game interpretation of living human beings but, I don’t know, was it something in the make up or lighting that made me feel that Irvine wasn’t even on set. He felt, a lot of the time, like a bad CGI render of a person, much like you would find in a game. And it was totally off putting and maybe contributed to my personal apathy in regards to this film. I am caring much less about manipulated pixels and much more about flesh and blood when I watch a movie. It’s almost like the director ran a filter or some such thing over some of the main characters to make them seem more lifeless than perhaps they should have been. So, if it was a deliberate choice then well done for making me think I was watching a video game but... yeah, I don’t want to see a video game when I’m sitting in a cinema. I want to see something that will move me or connect with me on an intellectual level, rather than break everything down to something somewhat lesser than the sum of its pixels. Which is sadly what happened here for me. 

And so that’s my main takeaway from Return To Silent Hill, I’m afraid. It started off well like a white knuckle ride but steadily lost any traction as I lost empathy for any of the characters or the situations they found themselves in. What I thought would be my favourite film in the franchise turns out to be the worst entry in the series. So, yeah, nothing more to say on this one, I’m afraid, That’s me done on these for a while.  

The Vault Of Horror

 

Taking It EC

The Vault Of Horror
UK 1973 
Directed by Roy Ward Baker
Amicus/20th Century Fox  Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: A vault of spoilers. 

The Vault Of Horror was another of the Amicus portmanteau horror films with which they had a lot of success and, as the title suggests, the five stories found within (not including the framing story, I would guess) are adaptations from various 1950s EC comics, repeating the formula from their Tales From The Crypt movie (reviewed here). Despite the title and what it claims on the opening credits, which play out mostly over shots of London, none of the stories in the film are actually taken from the original The Vault Of Horror comic... instead, the segment entitled The Neat Job is taken from an issue of Shock Suspense Stories while the others are versions of stories first published in the pages of Tales From The Crypt. 

The film starts off with an elevator picking up various of the five main characters, played by Michael Craig, Curd Jürgens, Terry Thomas, Daniel Massey and Tom Baker. They are all going down but, down way further than any of them expect, as the elevator deposits them all in an underground chamber. They can’t get the elevator to take them back and so, for the rest of the film, they exchange stories about various nightmares which have been bothering them, allowing the audience access into the five segments which make up the majority of the film’s running time. 

Now, I’ve actually read four of these stories but only remember three of them in terms of a little of the details, because I read the entire run of Tales From The Crypt a few years back. So in the first story, I can definitely tell you that the term adaptation is loosely used. Don’t get me wrong, we still have the same story and the final panel of the comic is rendered as the final shot of that story but, yeah, it’s been watered down somewhat.

To explain, the first story is based on the Tales From The Crypt story Midnight Mess. In this, Daniel Massey pays a private detective who goes to find his lost sister, who has been left everything after their father has died. The detective, played by Mike Pratt (Randall, from Randall And Hopkirk Deceased) finds her but is killed by Massey, who then goes to find his sister. He can’t get served in a restaurant because it closes early in the village she is staying in, so he goes to her house and kills her. He then goes back to the restaurant, which now appears to be open. However, when he’s served dishes made from blood and human flesh, he complains and gives himself away. The waiter pulls back the big curtains in the restaurant to reveal a big mirror... casting only his reflection. All of the other diners are vampires, including his sister who also has a drink when the patrons set him up in the bar as a human bar tap, syphoning his blood ‘fresh from the source’ as the still alive Massey has a tap plugged into an open wound on his neck. Incidentally, his sister is played by real life sister Anna Massey. 

The problem with this segment... and why it’s watered down, in my opinion... is that in the original comic book, the lead character was an innocent. He doesn’t kill anyone but he suffers the same fate anyway... with the last panel being much more graphic in its depiction, if memory serves. I get the feeling the writers here turned him into an evil character so that it feels morally right to have him killed in such a grim fashion. Which kinda weakens the story but, there you go, this film pulls its punches a bit, that’s all. 

The next segment, The Neat Job, is the one told by great British comic actor Terry Thomas, where he marries a character played by actress Glynis Johns. This one is actually quite fun and you can tell these two must have really enjoyed working on this. It turns out that, after they are married, the wife finds out her husband is one of those people with a mania for neatness and everything in its proper place... with even his tool room with jars for each different kind of screw thread or length, kitchen cupboards with tick boxes to indicate stock replenishment etc. After a while, her attempts to please her husband culminate in a sequence where she bumbles about and manages to wreck a couple of rooms as she tries to re-tidy them for him when he comes home. On his discovery of the shambles, she deals him a huge hammer blow and we see the comedian with a claw hammer sticking out of the top of his head before he topples. In the final scene of this story, his wife has pulled out all his various body part and internal organs and put them all in correctly labelled, categorised jars. 

The third story is This Trick’ll Kill You and it’s features a stage magician played by Curd Jürgens and his wife played by Dawn Addams. While on holiday in India, looking for magic tricks, he stumbles onto a really good version of the old Indian rope trick but he can’t persuade the young lady performing the trick to sell it to him at any price. So he arranges a private show for his wife in their hotel room and, while the girl is performing the trick, he stabs her dead. He then re-performs the trick and his wife climbs up the rope but, suddenly, she disappears at the top of the rope and a slowly spreading puddle of her blood forms on the ceiling where the rope was leading too. The rope then gets out of control and has its revenge on Jürgens. 

The fourth story, Bargain In Death, is the worst of the five and features Michael Craig in a dire and slight tale of a man who slows his heart to fake death so he and his friend can split the insurance money... and then expects his friend to dig him up but, obviously, that part doesn’t happen. He does get dug up though, by a gravedigger played by Arthur Mullard at the request of two young medical student friends who need the body. In a curious piece of what would now be called stunt casting, the two med students are played by Robin Nedwell and Geoffrey Davies, who were known as the ‘comedy doctor’ duo in the long running British TV sitcom Doctor In The House. The other nice part of this is when one of the characters is seen reading the novelisation of the Amicus Tales From The Crypt movie.

The fifth story, Drawn And Quartered, stars Tom Baker as a British artist living in Haiti. When an old friend stumbles on him, he finds out that his old agent who had deemed his paintings worthless and bought them for a song, has colluded with an art critic and buyer and his paintings are now fetching high prices in London. So he goes to a voodoo man who gives his painting hand magical powers and he returns to London to take his revenge. Anything he paints and then erases or destroys gets erased or destroyed in a similar fashion and so he paints the three and causes them pain and death by taking their hands or eyes or, in the case of his agent, played by Denholm Elliot, gets him to shoot himself due to drawing a red dot on the forehead of the painting. However, he shouldn’t have left his own self portrait out in the open after he found leaving it in his safe was depriving him of oxygen after a while! Any kind of accident could happen to it. 

And that’s the five stories and then, of course, the elevator doors open to a graveyard and it turns out the men are all dead and forced to tell the same stories to each other for eternity. However, unlike the comics, the Vault Keeper who used to present the tales didn’t make it into the movie.

But it is an entertaining movie and it’s easily one of my favourites in the Amicus portmanteau horror series, falling just behind Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors (reviewed by me here). Roy Ward Baker’s direction is assured and, once again, he uses some interesting camera movements... like that trick he does where he will zoom into something at the end of a camera pan to change the focus of the frame. Douglas Gamley’s score is also pretty good and he seems to use the Dies Irae musical motif a lot throughout the movie (darn, I wish there was a soundtrack CD to this one... or to any of Gamley’s music, to be honest). 

And, yeah, not much else to add to this. The Vault Of Horror, despite being the only one of the Amicus horror portmanteaus that didn’t star Peter Cushing, is a really entertaining little film and one I would happily watch a number of times. Something about the print or transfer on this seemed a little dodgy, I thought but, it’s still pretty watchable and I’m sure the Blu Ray authors have done the best they can with the materials. Definitely worth a look sometime if you are into this period of British horror movies, for sure.

Zoinks! The Spooky Folklore Behind Scooby Doo

 

Scooby Diving

Zoinks! The Spooky 
Folklore Behind Scooby Doo
By Mark Norman
Chin Beard Books and Oak Tree Books
ISBN 9781837916702

Well this was a pretty fantastic Birthday present for me this year, it has to be said. I originally saw it on BlueSky when one of the people I follow, Raskolnik highlighted it in a post and, it turns out Zoinks! The Spooky Folklore Behind Scooby Doo, pretty much does what it says on the tin, written by a leading UK folklore scholar who I will need to look into at some point in the future, for sure. 

The book is split into seven chapters, bookended by an intro and outro from figures behind the scenes of various of the many variants of the show through the years, not to mention a large appendix of episode guide style lists too. Right away from the start, I was hooked in by the author with Chapter One, Colleges and Cannabis - Scooby Doo Legends In The Real World. 

And this one is a little different from most of the other chapters in the book, in that it investigates the myths created by the show itself and its influence on the world around it... before diving into the other chapters which live up, in no uncertain terms, to the title of the book. This chapter was extremely illuminating for this particular reader, as I haven’t seen many iterations of the show over the years, it has to be said. For example I discovered that, while Scooby-Doo is written... well,  as I just wrote it... in the majority of TV and film properties of the brand, the original first two seasons from the 1960s and 70s correctly write it as Scooby Doo. This is because Doo is actually Scooby’s family name, with Scooby itself being a shortening of his real name, one Scoobert Doo.

Also, although she’s had occasional relationships with men in the series, it would seem that Velma is actually written as a lesbian. And did you know that the term ‘jinkies’ comes from a historical and less blasphemous version of ‘By Jove’? And, furthermore, ‘Zoinks!’ might well have derived from ‘gadzooks’, or rather ‘God’s hooks’. The writer also discusses how much of the folklore of various areas and times was either fuelled by... and in some instances completely created from thin air... various smugglers over the years, in order to keep upstanding citizens, or possibly just some ‘meddling kids’, away from their areas of operation, by scaring people off with the imagery and ‘cosplay’ of said myth. 
 
Chapter Two, Landscape And The Gothic looks at the visual tropes of the ‘state of being gothic’ such as run down crumbling architecture and the appearance of the full moon. Indeed, it even shows how a crescent moon on the show set in one night will suddenly become a full moon for events taking place on the next night, purely to fulfil that gothic vision and tone of the show, flying in the face of continuity. 

Chapter Three, Gh-gh-gh-gh-gh-ghosts is an interesting chapter also, with many stereotypes of ghosts from various literary wells explained, especially as to how they are visually depicted. For instance, in the mid fifteenth to eighteenth century, it was common for the recently deceased to be wrapped in a winding cloth or shroud and be placed in the ground wrapped in that... because only the wealthy could afford such luxury items as a coffin. Hence the depiction of ghosts as being seen as sheet wearing spirits. Reports of a ghost in Hammersmith in 1803 further fuelled this depiction. Also covered in this chapter... which I won’t go into too much here... are the origins of the visual variant of some ghosts being depicted bound in chains and also the variant of an empty, animated suit of armour. As well as such phenomena as mirror ghosts, curses, Crystallomancy, seances, psychics, spirit boards, Knockers in mines and Civil War ghosts.

Chapter Four, Snips and Snails, Witches in Scooby Doo, looks at such things as Tasseomancy and the derivation of the term hag coming from ‘Hægtesse’, which means witch in Middle English. While Chapter Five, Indigenous, Ancient and Non-Western Cultures looks at cryptids such as the abominable snowman, big foot, Japanese dragons, Chinese dragons, Jinn and even at places like Shangri La or communities such as the Mayan and Aztec Civilisations.

Chapter Six, Urban Legends and Folklore Motifs looks at exactly that, with such star performers as Spring Heeled Jack from Victorian times. It also accredits Richard Dorson as the person who first came up with the term ‘urban legend’ in 1968. Very interestingly, it looks at how familiar and reinvented modern legends are, in fact, not modern inventions at all but ones which have echoed down through history over the years. So the myth of alligators living and growing in the sewers saw its predecessor in Roman times, where it was believed that there were octopuses living in the sewers. 

The seventh and final chapter, Thoroughly Modern Scooby gets very up to date with stuff such as the recent rise of the fear of clowns and the, perhaps not so modern, alien abduction phenomenon. Not to mention entering the somewhat dodgy realms of AI. 

And it’s an absolute joy to read, rendered in an entertaining writing style with lots of fun, informative facts. My one criticism would be in reference to the Scooby Snack. While noting that capsules made from psychedelic mushroom psilocybe cubensis are nick-named Scooby Snacks in the real life drug community, after the show, the writer informs us that said treat was not in the show until the 1980s... a relatively modern phenomena. However, this didn’t quite ring true to me and it glitched in my brain... so I went back to my CD recording of the original theme song from 1969 and found the Scooby Snack is definitely mentioned in the lyrics. Perhaps in a more general sense of a plethora of snacks in the show but, nonetheless, it’s right there. 

But it’s a minor criticism and, all in all, I’d have to say I was completely blown away by Zoinks! The Spooky Folklore Behind Scooby Doo and it’s a hard recommend for me. I might have to track down the original show I remember growing up with in the early seventies as repeats on the BBC if I can find a decent Blu Ray at some point. Although I have bad memories of canned laughter plaguing the show too. But, however that pans out, this is a truly excellent book by a very entertaining writer and shouldn’t be missed, if this is the kind of thing you are interested in. 

Charlies Angels - Full Throttle (unrated)

Fallen Angel

Charlies Angels 
Full Throttle (unrated)
USA 2003 Directed by McG
Columbia Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Angelic spoilers unleashed.

Okay, I’ve revisited Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle again and, I have to say, I was disappointed that the Blu Ray and various home video releases available in the UK are still the original, cut down and censored theatrical cut of the movie. Well, I wasn’t having any of that so I upgraded from my DVD of the old unrated US edition of the movie to a new US Blu Ray edition of the same, so I could once again watch the slightly sexier version of the movie, including extra blood splashes gushing out of the mouths of the Angels when they are hit in the face (which may not seem like much to some but, hey, I won’t abide censorship). So I’m now finding out that the UK is the only country which doesn’t have the uncut version released in some format so, yeah, if you want to watch this movie properly, make sure you import the unrated edition over from the states (and make sure your player can play the correct zone/region into which it’s been encoded over there) . 

Now, I’m still not sure why this brilliant movie failed at the box office when the first one was so loved by audiences. I remember taking the day off work so I could see this in its first day in cinemas (in the theatrical version, naturally) and I absolutely loved it and assumed it would be a big hit again. I mean, everything seems a tad more than the first film and, well, what’s wrong with that? Clearly, not everyone agreed with me. 

This one starts, just like the first film, with a pre-credits, end of mission action sequence zooming in from the Columbia lady logo, featuring the three angels played by Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu and Cameron Diaz but, unlike the first film, it directly relates to the plot of the rest of the movie. Following both that and a second parody of the old TV series opening credits, we go straight to a scene where Bruce Willis, in a cameo, is shot by a masked assailant... who later turns out to be his already ex-wife Demi Moore playing an ex-Angel... who is the brains behind the whole criminal operation. Add in more fun with an evil ex-boyfriend of Barrymore’s character and absolutely heaps of action and we get what, to me, seemed then and does now, like a rollicking good, highly entertaining, female-centric action movie.

And, like I said, everything seems a little more. The idea of using completely different colour palettes for each scene seems, somehow, much more blatant, for example... the pre-credits scene where Bruce Willis gets killed is lit entirely in blue (or possibly with a blue filter over everything) and a scene later, which is a parody of an episode of CSI, is lit entirely in red like an old photographer’s developing room. And another scene where the lighting is so stylised is in a parody of the prison release scene from the remake of Cape Fear. And, as I’m describing this, you can already see that there are absolutely loads of pop culture references scattered about the movie. 

For instance, the CSI parody scene uses the old The Who song, Who Are You? which I believe was used as the theme tune to one of the variants of CSI and, I believe I’m right in saying Cameron Diaz is made up to look like one of the male stars of that show in this scene? And Bernard Herrmann’s famous Cape Fear theme is also used in a few places in the movie, to push the obsessive nature of Barrymore’s ex-boyfriend’s obsession with killing her in revenge for his long imprisonment. 

Among other such confections, some of the more interesting references include a reunion at Rydell High School (although, sadly, none of the stars of the Grease films turn up for this) and at least two references to Singin’ In The Rain, one with the Good Morning couch gag at the end of the M C Hammer dance number near the start of the movie and the other is, for people who know the 1952 musical well, a parody of the “Zelda! Oh, Zelda!” moment at the film premiere scene at Hollywood. 

There are also quite a few cameo appearances by a whole host of people including Pink (who is in scene while one of her songs written for the movie is played in the background), Carrie Fisher as the Mother Superior where a back story origin of the popular villain from the first movie, the ‘creepy, thin man’ played again by Crispin Glover, takes place (the Playboy Mansion stands in as the building used for the convent here) and John Cleese as Lucy Liu’s father. Of course, one nice apparition of a cameo is actress Jaclyn Smith, reprising her role as original TV Angel Kelly Garrett, to offer a bit of advice to Drew Barrymore when she’s in trouble. 

And speaking of returning Angels, I can’t find any mention of it now but my understanding is, one was asked to return and definitely didn’t. I remember reading at the time that Kate Jackson was asked to reprise her original TV role as Sabrina Duncan, as the rogue angel gone bad... but she didn’t want to show her old character in a bad light... so the name was changed and Demi Moore (who to be fair, does look a little like her in this movie), took the role instead. Again, I don’t have any evidence now that this was the case but I certainly remember reading this back in 2003 at some point. 

Whatever the case, catching up with this now, I’m amazed that this one did so poorly at the box office. I was waiting for another sequel for a while before I realised this one must have bombed... it’s a great shame because McG directed two absolutely stunning Charlies Angel’s films and, frankly, Full Throttle certainly doesn’t let the first movie down in any way. I loved it then and I love it now. This one will always be on my top tier Hollywood action movie recommend list, along with the first. Don’t turn your back on this one, it’s fantastic. 

OSS117 - Mission To Tokyo

Tokyo Selves To Death

OSS117 - Mission To Tokyo
aka Atout coeur à Tokyo 
pour OSS 117
aka Terror In Tokyo
aka From Tokyo With Love
France/Italy 1966
Directed by Michel Boisrond
Gaumont/Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

The fourth feature in Kino Lorber’s Blu Ray set of the five 1960s incarnations of OSS117 is OSS117 - Mission To Tokyo and, I was kind of holding out hope that this one would be a lot better than it’s predecessors, being as it’s not directed by André Hunebelle this time around... just ‘presented by’ him. Instead it’s directed by Michel Boisrond and, to further whet my appetite for the movie, instead of being based completely on a Jean Bruce novel, it’s instead ‘adapted by’ two people (and apparently the adaptation is pretty much a completely new story, such as often happened with the James Bond films this series was trying to compete with, up to a certain point), one of whom is Terence Young, who of course directed Dr. No (reviewed here) and helped groom Sean Connery to bring a definitive image of Bond to the screen. And I was similarly impressed that it’s set in Japan with many of the kinds of cultural elements utilised in You Only Live Twice (reviewed here) all present and correct here... a good year before the Bond film was even released. I guess the producers must have got wind that the next Bond would be set in Japan. 

But yes, even with all these good things going for it, this one is still quite a dull and disappointing affair and, perhaps better than the previous one but maybe not as good as the Kerwin Matthews films. Once again Frederick Stafford takes on the role of Hubert Bonnisseur de la Bath, aka OSS117, for his second and final time and, he’s not completely unlikable but, once again, I have to note that Matthews was a much more animated personality than this guy... which is really saying something. Although in fairness, Stafford does look a lot more like the typical movie spy of the time. 

The plot involves the world being blackmailed by a secret organisation who are using miniature planes to launch nuclear missiles at secret US government intelligence headquarters around the world unless, of course, they are paid huge sums of money. So OSS117 is sent to Tokyo for no earthly reason that I could fathom. I can only assume the Japanese were widely admired for their miniaturisation techniques and leave it at that. There’s a turncoat gal, played by Marina Vlady, who provides the story twists when she’s revealed to be helping the bad guys before turning coat again and working with Hubert. Plus there’s a second OSS117 girl in the form of a Japanese secret service sergeant played by Jitsuko Yoshimura, who you may remember as the younger of the two female protagonists/antagonists of Onibaba. There are the usual twists and turns plus the odd fist fight or car chase (although the opening action pre-credits sequence is nowhere near the quality of the Bond pictures) and it’s pretty much business as usual as far as this film series goes. 

One interesting bit of business, which heavily foreshadows You Only Live Twice, is a rival faction of thugs who you assume are out to get Hubert in the opening half an hour or so of the movie (but, yeah, not really... you’ll see it coming as soon as this bunch are first introduced) but who turn out to be the Japanese secret service, who then team up to help OSS117 fulfil his mission. 

And, there are a few nice shot set ups too. One such occurs when a character is in long shot and walking back towards his car from the right of the screen to the left. The camera starts moving sideways until a decorative architectural detail of an upright post with an elabourate carving, hollow and leaving a big hole in the middle of it, hits the centre of the screen and the car has shifted with the camera viewpoint until it’s directly lined up in the centre of the opening of that upright. Then the character continues walking to the centre of the shot and gets in his car in the small opening in the centre of the screen. Which is a nice way of doing things. There also a huge amount of effort to get the look right, such as a shot which reminded me of something of the deliberately controlled lighting in a specific sequence in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (reviewed here). As a shady figure in a raincoat at the end of the corridor, his face under shadows like a film noir, lights his cigarette, it lights up his face just a little too much when the lighter is engaged, making it evident that a light source hidden from view has been switched on at the same time to complete the effect, before being switched off again when the lighter is flicked closed. 

All in all, it’s not a terrible film but, accompanied once again by Michel Magne’s rather tepid score... which is fine as a stand alone listen but certainly doesn’t really seem to elevate the on screen action and pacing of the film... it’s all just a little dull and struggles to engage the viewer, at least this audience member, it has to be said. 

So that’s me done with OSS117 - Mission To Tokyo. Some may find it more yawn inducing than thrilling, I suspect. For the last film in the set we have American actor John Gavin taking over the role but we also have André Hunebelle back in the driving seat so, yeah, I’m maybe not looking forward to it as much as I’d hoped, to be honest. I’ll report back here with a review when I can. 

The Land Unknown

Rotor Blade Runner

The Land Unknown
USA 1957
Directed by Virgil W. Vogel
Universal/101 Films 
Blu Ray Zone B/DVD Region 2 Dual Edition

Well, I’ve somehow never encountered this 1950s B-movie before now and, luckily, one of the semi-regular 101 Films online sales meant I could pick the thing up cheaply and finally see it. I’m not sure why I never caught The Land Unknown on television as a kid but, catching up to it now, it’s possible that it just wasn’t that well thought of enough even to schedule it on a Sunday afternoon on the BBC (or maybe I just managed to miss it). Either way, I’ve seen it now and I’m here to tell you that this movie is actually fairly awful, not all that entertaining but, I dunno, is something of a comforting watch (I’d watch this again, even though it didn’t do much for me, it has to be said).

Anyway, this film was apparently inspired by real life events when, in 1947, warm water was discovered in Antarctica. All this is used in a very long briefing by a Navy chief to his crew who, ten years later, are going out there with thier ships, seaplanes and helicopters, to explore various sections of the South Pole to try and figure out why there are warm waters in certain areas. This opening section is, in all honesty, interminably dull and it’s only livened up when Commander Alan Roberts (played by none other than Jock ‘Tarzan’ Mahoney) and his sidekick  Lt. Jack Carmen (played by William Reynolds) are introduced to the female reporter for the Oceanic Press, Margaret Hathaway (played by Shirley Patterson) and she utters the only memorable line in the movie, “I always love to meet men, Captain”.

At any rate, two months later, Alan, Jack, Margaret and Steve Miller (played by Phil Harvey... no, not that Steve Miller) find themselves at the Antarctic and in a helicopter flying over said warm water. Alas, a storm comes along and, as they’re trying to get back to their base ship, a Pterodactyl gives them a swipe with it’s wing, damaging an essential part of their ‘copter and forcing them to crash land in a volcanic valley. Here they encounter dangerous grab-you-while-you’re-not-looking vegetation, two giant lizards, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a Plesiosaur and, no less a villain for most of the movie until he kinda redeems himself at the end, the hostile survivor of an exploration team from ten years prior... Hunter, played by none other than Henry Brandon. You may remember Brandon in some famous roles such as the titular doctor in the 1940 serial Drums Of Fu Manchu, as Scar in The Searchers and  even an appearance as a tough, old timer cop in John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13. 

Now there are two big problems with the film but, in its favour is that it mostly looks nice. It was originally supposed to be a full colour A-picture but, when Universal slashed the budget and went for a black and white B-picture instead, famed director Jack Arnold jumped ship and Virgil W. Vogel, director of The Mole People (reviewed here) took over. But lets get back to those two problems...

One problem is the tone of the special effects... in some ways they’re pretty good in that, asides from the old chestnut of having two real lizards fighting, standing in for dinosaurs, the various actual ‘man-in-suit’ dinosaur creations in the film are dropped in quite credibly against both the real live action and also the various miniatures, with rarely a matt line or juddery mismatch to be seen (an illusion which even survives the beautiful Blu Ray transfer of the film, put out here by 101 Films). Sadly, the majority of the actual dinosaurs spliced in like this are far from credible in and of themselves. I mean, the Plesiosaur is fairly easy on the eye but that T-Rex (the head apparently later re-used as the dino under the stairs in the original TV series The Munsters) looks quite ridiculous and, no matter how cleverly it’s interpolated into the surrounding footage, it really doesn’t save it.

The other big problem with the movie are the practicalities. We have a big, hulking Tyrannosaurus Rex who has to back off because his seemingly tough skin is sliced apart by the rotors of the grounded helicopter (the rotor blades completely unscathed by the encounter). I mean, really? Also, although our heroes... such as they are and they’re, refreshingly for the time, ‘shades of grey’, almost anti-heroes... spend almost 25 days in the prehistoric valley (such as it is), they stay clean shaven. How and why have they got, in their unlikely helicopter full of provisions, a bunch of razor blades from somewhere? Certainly, this issue isn’t addressed in the film at all and just ignored, as our less than facially rugged protagonists explore their new domain. 

And finally, how does long term survivor Henry Brandon know that blowing in a specific shell frightens away dinosaurs? I mean, how do you find this stuff out in the first place? In this hostile environment where you’re trying to be as quiet as possible so as not to become dino food, did he just decide to blow into one within the vicinity of a giant beast for fun one day? None of these questions are addressed, let alone explained, in the course of the adventures.

And there you have it. I really don’t have much good to say about The Land Unknown. I kinda half enjoyed it and I found it comforting to switch the brain off and do nothing... which is how I suspect people who watch football (for whatever reason or motivation those bizarre people behave like that) feel when they are watching their team pit their leg woggling skills against an enemy team, maybe. So, yeah, I can’t recommend this one, in all honesty and, I can’t even say it’s not a complete dud... but I did personally get some entertainment value out of it and, as I said, I would watch this one again. I guess you’ll probably need to go with your gut on this one. 

Death In Paradise

Paradise Lost

Death In Paradise
USA 2006 Directed by Robert Harmon 
Sony Pictures TV Blu Ray Zone 1

Warning: Some big spoilerage.

The third of the Jesse Stone TV movies, based on Robert B. Parker’s crime novels, is Death In Paradise. Once again we join the chief of police in Paradise, Massachusets as played, very thoughtfully and introvertedly, by Tom Selleck (an actor I’ve always liked but barely seen because he doesn’t usually star in the films I would want to see... it’s only because my dad loves these Jesse Stone films that I’m discovering them now*). 

This one seems to have a lot going on in it and starts off with the discovery of a corpse in water... which has only been there about three weeks but, that’s enough to make identification hard (it almost looks like a mummy). It turns out it’s the body of a thirteen year old girl and Jesse and his department have to find out who murdered her... although it takes a while to identify just who she is, at first. 

Meanwhile, there’s another sub plot involving a woman who is regularly abused by her husband whenever he drinks, in a domestic violence case. This one actually did not end up where I thought it would but, yeah, there are consequences to the team of regulars in the pursuit of this one. 

And talking about sub plots... two more things Jesse has to deal with is a) dating a local doctor from a college and b) trying to give up drinking by seeing a psychiatrist. I’m guessing the drinking stuff will take a few movies to sort out (and then I’m guessing a backslide for Jesse too) and, I don’t know if the woman he’s dating hangs over into anymore of the movies either... time will tell I guess. 

Here’s a thing though... of the two main cases which Jesse is dealing with in this story, the murder and the domestic violence... both trails end in death. In fact, Jesse either kills or gives rise to a kill in self defence, three people when all is said and done. So, yeah, although I enjoy Selleck playing the monosyllabic, often silent type of person, he does have his moments where he becomes a man of action, so to speak. I’m not sure that’s a good spin for the character and I’ll have to keep an eye on his body count in future, I think. 

Two more quick things. 

In a couple of flashback sequences, as Stone is trying to figure out how the girl got to be at the bottom of a lake, weighted down, we see some shots of her under water a little like the lady in the water in the second of Frank Sinatra’s Tony Rome films, Lady In Cement (without the nudity). And then, later in the episode, a ghostly vision of her appears to Jesse in his office, saying what Molly will say when she enters a few seconds later, to highlight to Stone that it’s an important clue and that he should follow it up. So this is interesting stuff here and I’m wondering if he’ll have any other ghostly visions as the film series continues. 

Once again, Selleck is surrounded by good actors including regulars (so far) Viola Davis as Molly Crane and Kohl Sudduth as Suitcase... both who work under him. Here’s another thing though... and this is the big spoiler here folks... I said one of the things Stone is working on has consequences later down the line. When the wife beater fires a shot off in the local supermarket, Stone is forced to shoot him dead (he fires twice in the end because the first shot doesn’t incapacitate the perpetrator) but shortly afterwards he discovers that the shot that went wild from the guy has hit Suit in the head. So for the rest of the episode, Suit is in a coma in a hospital bed and Jesse and Molly take turns to read to him, to try and spark some kind of response. And, as the story concludes, Jesse is still reading to the unconscious Suit before the credits roll. So I’m kind of on tenterhooks now to see if the character survives to come back for the next film in the series or not. I’m kind of hoping he will but, obviously, with him in a coma, they could string this one out for quite some time. 

I guess I’ll know soon enough because, that’s me done on the third of the Jesse Stone movies, Death In Paradise. I’m liking these a lot more than I thought I would and am looking forward to watching the next one soon. 

* I wrote this review about a year before he recently passed away.

28 Years Later - The Bone Temple

Savile Row

28 Years Later - 
The Bone Temple
Directed by Nia DaCosta
UK/USA 2025
Columbia
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: 28 Spoilers Later...

Okay, so 28 Years Later - The Bone Temple, is the fourth in what I shall call the ‘28 Units Of Man Made Measures Of Duration’ franchise and the second of the trilogy which is a sequel to the first two films. It’s also a very direct sequel to 28 Years Later (reviewed here) and, as much as I loved Nia DaCosta’s The Marvels (reviewed here), I’d have to say I really didn’t love this fourth film at all. This one has two story elements which, inevitably, meet up in the final act. 

So we have the somewhat overly long continuation of Spike (played by Alfie Williams), who finds himself reluctantly joining the team of satanists who base their look on Jimmy Saville, lead by Sir Jimmy Crystal (played by Jack O'Connell) and we have the other story element... Ralph Fiennes playing the doctor who befriended Spike in the first movie, this time actually having somewhat of an epiphany and actually coming up with a cure for the RAGE infested zombie-like creatures, in the shape of “I’ll be your Bub for this movie” Samson (played by Chi Lewis-Parry)... which is the only part of the story I was truly invested in, truth be told.

Basically, the whole movie plays out like some kind of home invasion movie, one of my least favourite genres of cinema, as the Jimmys do really nasty, brutal things to innocent folk... somewhat hammering home the obvious message that, while the RAGE zombies are a credible threat, they’re not really evil like that observed when humanity is given free reign. No surprise that the Jimmys are the villains of the movie. 

Um... yeah, I don’t have much good to say about this installment, to be honest... apart from Fiennes amazing performance of an

Iron Maiden number towards the end of the film (which is not a group I know but he put on a good show), it just didn’t hit right with me and felt somewhat out of place under the franchise umbrella, I thought, 

A criticism is that they never mention Jimmy Saville by name, invoking the name Jimmy Crystal instead for whatever reason but, it has to be said, with the look and the mannerisms... and constant cries of “Owzat!”... any audience member born in the UK of a certain age will have absolutely no doubt in their minds who this ‘cult of Jimmy’ is based on. There are also more Teletubby references, for those who dig such things. 

The end of the movie sets up the third (fifth) part by having the return of a character (and a taxi... and a nice signature nedle drop) from the very first movie, 28 Days Later, which will please fans of that movie and which promises some kind of connection to the films outside of the RAGE monsters themselves. 

But, yeah, somewhat of a shorter review than that of the last movie and I apologise but, I just didn’t find this one very interesting. Not completely dull but somehow less creative than the other films in the franchise, I thought. Although that epilogue and the final fate of the Jimmys as seen in this one does seem to set up the idea that... well... there must be other interesting things to say about the whole scenario after this one. 28 Years Later - The Bone Temple isn’t a complete dud but, yeah, it’s definitely the worst of the films so far and I’m fine to wait however many years it is until the next part of the franchise, for sure. 

Annual Cryptic Movie Quiz 2025 Answers

Quizwoz Answers

Okay everybody. Thanks for all who took part in my Annual Cryptic Movie Quiz for the end of 2025. This year’s winners are returning winners from last year with full marks... Chris and Ross from Manchester. Well done lads.

For all you who want to know which ones you got wrong (or indeed right), here are the puntastic and cryptic answers for you all.

1. Egyptian corpse owns technical equipment. 
An Egyptian corpse would be a mummy. If a person owns technical equipment then he/she “has tech”, so aztec. So we get the first film in The Aztec Mummy Trilogy.

2. What you give people for Christmas.
Well, presents so... yeah... Presence.

3. A central stage for spherical objects used in sports.
A spherical object used in a sport could be a ball. A central stage used in sports could be an arena. So we get John Wick spin off Ballerina.

4. The pride of lions’ fierce vocals are just over 19 decibels.
Lions fierce vocal sounds are a roar. One decibel over 19 decibels would be 20 so... The Roaring Twenties.

5. Suffering a disease in which a high temperature is a prominent symptom, on an evening at the weekend.
A disease could be a fever. An evening at the weekend could be a Saturday night. So... Saturday Night Fever.

6. A non X-rated firebird was polished up for the plan.
A firebird could be a phoenix but, non x-rated means you have to take away the x, which leaves phoeni. If you polished something up then it shone. Another term for a plan could be a scheme. So, phoeni-shone scheme... Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme.

7. Burglar belonging to the father of a kind of sack.
A sack could be a bag. The father could be a dad. The burglar is a thief. So we have, The Thief Of Bagdad.

8. A choice between two indefinite articles.
Two indefinite articles are an and a. A choice implies one or another... so an or a, or rather Oscar winning Anora.

9. A dagger of frozen water.
Frozen water is ice. A dagger is a knife. So we have one of have Carrol Baker’s Italian gialli, A Knife Of Ice.

10. A musical composition made out of soup.
Simply unscramble the letters of soup to get a type of musical composition, so O P U S. Recent John Malkovich thriller Opus.

11. The incorrect leg wear.
Trousers but they’re wrong. It’s the second Wallace And Gromit short film The Wrong Trousers.

12. The specific nomenclature of a prickly stemmed flower.
Nomenclature denotes a name. The prickly stemmed flower is a rose. So Sean Connery does Umberto Eco thriller The Name Of The Rose.

13. Bond villain’s tool for accessing his front door.
The Bond villain I was thinking of was Largo (played by Adolfo Celli in Thunderball and Klaus Maria Brandauer in Never Say Never Again). To access his front door he would surely need a front door key. So the Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson movie Key Largo.

14. Equine’s wing plumage.
Equine implies horse. Plumage is traditionally feathers. So we have the classic Marx Brothers movie Horse Feathers.

And that’s it for 2025’s end of year quiz. As always, I hope it gave some of you something to keep you occupied in any Christmas downtime and that you enjoyed having a crack at it. Let me know if you want me to keep coming up with these end of year quizzes. Feedback is always welcome. 

The Complete Adventures of Señorita Scorpion Volume 2

Sting In The Tale

The Complete Adventures 
of Señorita Scorpion Volume 2
by Lee Savage Jr and Emmett McDowell
Altus Press
ISBN 9781618270702

Following on from the first volume (reviewed by me here), The Complete Adventures of Señorita Scorpion Volume 2 is the concluding collection of stories originally appearing in issues of the pulp magazine Action Stories between 1945 and 1949. And, having read the first volume, I’d have to say that these particular stories are not what I was expecting. 

Following an introduction by modern pulp writer Will Murray (one of the modern writers of Doc Savage who actually gets the formula right), we plummet straight into the first of the four stories collected here, Brand Of The Gallows-Ghost, from the Winter 1945 issue. 

This one, like many of the Señorita Scorpion stories, doesn’t feature the Scorpion, aka Elgera Douglas, herself in all that many sequences. She pops up here and there while other characters, like her romantic interest Chisos Owens, shouldering the majority of the action and deduction of the tale. The secret ingredient being that, as usual, everybody is talking about Elgera and she’s the focus point for the solution to the story. This yarn is pretty good and, once again, Lee Savage Jr uses his expressive language to craft a quite literary pulp, with wonderful passages like... “The moonlight dropped hesitant yellow fingers into the mysterious depths of Santa Helena Canyon…”. 

It’s all the standard Western tinted blood and thunder you could want... with a curious character name popping up. One of the female characters in the book is called Lupita Tovar and, I can only assume this is in homage to the 1920s-1950s Mexican actress of the same name, who my regular readers might remember best as being in the Spanish version of the 1931 Dracula, made on the same sets as the Lugosi Dracula (both reviewed here) during the evenings of the same shoot. 

The second story, Lash Of The Six Gun Queen, from the Winter 1947 edition of Action Stories, is where things get and, frankly, stay a little weird concerning the stories in this volume. This one is probably the stand out story in this collection but, unusually, it’s told in the first person from the point of view of a new character trying to bring Señorita Scorpion to justice (before falling for her and finding her innocent of her supposed crimes in the third act) rather than the standard third person. A good tale, though, nonetheless.

Then things get even weirder with the Winter 1948 tale Gun-Witch of Hoodoo Range, written this time by Emmett McDowell instead of regular writer Lee Savage Jr... and that change of writer shows in more than just the style, which is less expressive and poetic than Savage Jr’s prose (although it certainly has its moments too). However, the character of the Scorpion does not seem to be remotely like she was in the other books, always going around masked to hide a scar which she never previously had and with absolutely nobody referring to Elgera Douglas, nor indeed Chisos Owens, who is absent from both this story and, surprisingly, the next. In fact, the Scorpion in this is revealed to be a new love interest for a new character, who is the focal point of this one (none of the regular characters are in this at all) and, it’s revealed at the end that she duped everyone and that the real Señorita Scorpion died of wounds received half way through the tale. Wait... what?

This is a twist which is completely ignored when Lee Savage Jr returns to write the final tale, from Winter 1949, The Sting Of The Scorpion. This one has no mention of the events in the previous tale (as that one did of no events prior) and we definitely are back in the saddle with Elgera Douglas as the original Scorpion once more. 

That being said, this one differs from the others in that, a) there’s no Chisos Owens turning up or even mentioned here and b) this one stays with the Scorpion and she’s the main attraction of every story element, as we follow her adventure while she tries to prove her innocence, find out why she is being framed and identify who is doing it. It’s a pretty good tale but with no warning that it was intended to be the last. Actually, the main takeaway I got from the last two stories in this volume, both by different writers, is that a scabbard is not something which (unlike what the dictionary says) is just for holding swords. In these last two it’s referred to as the long holster on a horse which holds the rifles for the rider. So that was an interesting discovery... I need to do more research into that, I think. 

And there you have it. The Complete Adventures of Señorita Scorpion Volume 2 is very much a different experience to the first volume but, this makes it no less entertaining and I certainly had a good time with it. It’s a shame Lee Savage Jr never returned to the character but I understand there’s a newish, overpriced, short volume of three modern tales by different writers which I may have to look into at some point in the near future... so there’s that to look forward to.

February/The Blackcoat's Daughter

Half Term

February/
The Blackcoat's Daughter
Canada 2015
Directed by Oz Perkins
A24 Films

Okay, so February (aka The Blackcoat’s Daughter) is going to be a tricky film to talk about because there’s something about the movie which will dawn on a fair percentage of the audience maybe 20 minutes into the movie, when a third character is introduced... but I’m still going to try and shuffle around this element and attempt to not reveal anything, even though, as I implied, many people will reach a conclusion about a certain aspect of the movie fairly early on. 

Okay, so the basic set up is we have three girls who the narrative follows. The film is set in February, in what must be half term week. Two thirds of the action of the film takes place in a remote, snow surrounded, boarding school where two girls in their late teens, Katherine and Rose played by Kiernan Shipka and Lucy Boynton are left behind, when all the other girls are picked up by their parents for the holiday. So they have to stay there for a day or two with two, un-costumed nuns who work there while they are waiting for their parents to show up. However, something is happening in the school and there are rumours of satanic worship. Meanwhile, the third woman, Joan, played by Emma Roberts, has escaped from somewhere but a kindly gentleman and his wife pick her up and offer to drive her to where she’s going. 

And that’s really all I’m going to say about the plot because... well, because it’s actually a very simple story but the way the story is structured is fragmented and elliptical. This does two things... one, it makes the story more interesting to discover, simple as it is and two, it stops a certain trick of the story being detected by the audience until... well like I said... twenty minutes or so into it. 

The film is written and directed by Oz Perkins, who is the son of actor Anthony Perkins (who has recently, since I saw this and wrote this review, become quite a succesful presence in the modern cinematic landscape). And, it turns out he’s not a bad director. I don’t know if I’d go as far as calling this a horror film because I think a certain element of the plot depends on your point of view. I think it’s similar to Saint Maud (reviewed here) in terms of how the audience perceives or believes certain things, which will affect how you categorise this as either a horror or a thriller. But it does, at least, tend to use some of the tension of the horror film and it does get quite gory towards the end. Certainly, the director knows how to squeeze a large amount of dread from what was probably a small budget, delivering a film which manages to maintain a fairly creepy atmosphere, even in the parts of the movie which are unscored... there’s a scene where Katherine is gazing out of a window with no music but with a smile playing on her face which, once you’ve seen the movie, I think will be something you would remember. 

To accomplish this kind of atmosphere, the director mostly eschews camera movement, I noticed. Sure there’s a little but not much and he seems content to just place the camera in a static position for the most part and let the scenes play out just cutting from one point of view to another. It slows the pacing of the film considerably but, that’s okay, it’s what gives it the edge it has and I have to say it works very well when, really, the story perhaps doesn’t feel like it could hold up if the movie were sped up and, more pertinently, edited in a different manner to the way it’s presented here. 

Although it could be dismissed as a simplistic variant of an exorcist story... and I’d maybe have a hard time defending even that... the way in which the film is structured helps relieve the inherent malaise that many modern movies dipping their toes into that kind of territory seem to generate and, even though this is the director’s first feature, I’d have to say he really knows what he’s doing here.

Another element of the film, the sparsely spotted score by another member of the show business family, Elvis Perkins, is extremely effective when it is called upon to contribute, maintain or even generate the quite palpable tension inherent in a simple scene... like a girl walking slowly down a corridor. Also, the odd non-sequitur images such as one of a shadowy figure in a basement energetically pursuing some kind of ritual are pretty effective and are one of the things which help build the atmosphere where the audience, or at least me, are on the edge of their seat. 

And, for fear of accidentally including spoilers, that’s as much as I’ll say about February/The Blackcoat’s Daughter. Whether it’s a horror film or not is for you to decide but I think it would play well to those of you who enjoy the horror genre. The central element on which a certain part of the movie hinges on was perhaps less effective on me because of the way I clumsily perceive certain things but, yeah, I’d be curious to see what people think of the plot on this one, so I’ll recommend it to a couple of friends and see if they had a common experience. Either way, a well directed movie which is very much worth a look if you’re into movies which build a strong, slow burn atmosphere. Give it a go. 

The Mole People

Mole Keeper

The Mole People
USA 1956
Directed by Virgil W. Vogel
Universal/101 Films
Dual Edition 
Blu Ray Zone B/DVD Region 2

Warning: Yeah, this one has a bit of an ending spoiler.

Okay, so The Mole People is not exactly the best of the Universal atomic age monster movies, for sure but, for all its faults, I still find it a lot more watchable than Tarantula (reviewed here), it has to be said. It is quite a sluggish movie, however and, certainly does nothing to hook the audience from the start. After the familiar Universal logo comes up, we are presented with Dr. Frank C. Baxter appearing as... Dr. Frank C. Baxter, in a bizarre attempt to fool the audience that he’s a real expert on what he’s talking about. And he talks and talks and talks. Audiences are treated to around four and a half minutes of him telling us of various theories put forward over the centuries, using illustrations on a board, consisting of speculation about what lays beneath the Earth’s surface. Frankly, I would imagine he’s already lost half his audience fairly quickly and half of the drive-in customers would have possibly turned around and driven out again. 

For those that stayed, we are then treated to some opening titles which are quite well done, with the various bits of typography rising from the foreground rim of a steaming crater, presumably implying some volcanic activity. Then we join the three main male protagonists of the movie... Dr. Roger Bently (played by the sturdy block of wood that is John Agar), Dr. Jud Bellamin (played by Hugh Beaumont) and Professor Etienne Lafarge (played by the always watchable Nestor Paiva). The three of them, with various colleagues and diggers, are in Mesopotamia trying to find out what happened to the Chero dynasty. As luck would have it, they find a tablet which points to a snowy mountain. They climb it and find the ruins of a Sumerian temple but, one of their number is swallowed by the earth, opening a long shaft beneath the surface of the mountain. They follow their now dead colleague down and discover a race of Sumerian albinos who have been living beneath the Earth for years. How they’re albinos I don’t know... they have black hair and white painted faces which tend to make everyone look like Data from Star Trek The Next Generation. The sumerians also employ a bunch of mole monsters to do the digging for their mushroom food. 

Anyway, the doctors convince the antagonistic Sumerians, by way of their torch (the Sumerian’s are sensitive to strong light) that they are ambassadors to their God, explaining away Nestor Paiva’s death at the hands of a mole monster as him being summoned back to heaven. But the king and especially the high priest are unsure and it’s a race against time as to whether they can find their way back to the surface world before tensions become murderous for them. The high priest is played by none other than Alan Napier who, ten years later, would play the role he is probably best remembered for these days, as Alfred the Butler opposite Adam West’s Bruce Wayne in the Batman TV show. Meanwhile, the female love interest for John Agar appears in the form of Cynthia Patrick as Adad. She is given to Agar as she is different from all the others, not being born an albino. Things get a bit vague here I think.

And, it’s not a bad film but certainly not a pacey one for sure. We have to wait for almost half an hour of the 77 minute running time, for example, before we even catch sight of a mole monster. Now, it has to be said the many mole monster costumes and masks aren’t really anything to write home about in terms of convincing anyone that these are genuine living organisms, as opposed to just various men in monster suits but, it also has to be said, I do like the design of the monsters and they are a bit iconic (enough that they’ve been reproduced as various Universal monster themed action figures over the years). The make up design is credited, as a lot of these movies, to Bud Westmore but, yeah, whether it actually was Westmore who did these or one of his underlings well, I couldn’t tell you. I certainly don’t take it on trust (see Mallory O’Meara’s fantastic book, The Lady From The Black Lagoon, which I reviewed here for more information on the notorious Westmore). 

Actually, the monsters are pretty much everything here, as a lot of the first half an hour is various stock footage from previous films mixed in with close ups of actors dressed similarly, as the three original protagonists climb the mountain etc. Another bit of padding comes along when an ‘albino’ girl does a long and less than sexy slave dance to fill out the time. This film doesn’t really have an awful lot going for it when you put it down on paper but there are a few other things of interest asides from the monsters. 

One is a comment from one of the male heros when they are caught in a snowy avalanche and he remarks that sitting there in the middle of the avalanche is still safer than crossing Times Square. So, wow, Times Square must have had a bit of a reputation even in the 1950s, it would seem. 

Another interesting moment of genuine horror (for those days) is when three slave girls are sacrificed to the ‘Light Of Ishtar’... aka put in a room which lets in the bright sun from an opening above. Being as they are sensitive to light, when the dead bodies of the three girls are brought out of the room, they are burned black and flaky all over and it’s kinda interesting to see this strong an image as they are carted off in a 1950s Universal monster movie, to be honest. Earlier in the film, the director even tries a ‘fake out’ jump scare but, to be honest, it doesn’t really work. He does give it a good go though. 

One last thing of note is that, in the original cut presented to the studio, Bently and Bellamin escape with Bently’s new middle earth girlfriend Adad and, originally Bently and Adad were supposed to go off hand in hand, living happily every after. This doesn’t happen in the final release print however. In a bizarre twist, just as they get back to the ruined temple above ground, there is a small ground tremor and a big column falls on Adad, crushing her to death. Apparently, this reshoot took place at the insistence of the studio because, even though Adad is clearly not an albino and is just a normal looking person, the powers that be didn’t like the idea that this was still promoting an interracial relationship... so they nipped that in the bud by dropping a column on her. 

And there you go, that’s The Mole People. It’s not the film I remembered it being and it’s certainly a bit ploddy but, if you are a fan of these 1950s B-movie monster flicks then you should still have a good time with this one, especially when, in another moment which defies audience expectations, the mole monsters rise up to overthrow their oppressors and help the heroes escape. Yep, did not see that one coming for a while into the plot, it has to be said. So The Mole People does have a lot of interesting moments, for sure. Whether you think they add up to be something more than the sum of their parts though, is up to you.